Braden Halladay, eldest son of Roy, chosen by Blue Jays in 2019 MLB Draft

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Halladay surrounded by sons Braden (L) and Ryan (R) in 2014

The late Roy Halladay is justifiably beloved by the Philadelphia Phillies fan base. The big right-hander, who died tragically at the young age of just 40 while piloting his private plane in November 2017, was chosen as one of the 2018 Phillies Wall of Fame honorees after going 55-29 over parts of four seasons with the club.

‘Doc’ registered a 3.25 ERA and 1.119 WHIP mark across 103 starts with the Phillies, allowing 649 hits over 702.2 innings with a 633/137 K:BB. He also tossed a Perfect Game in a Phillies uniform, as well as one of only two postseason no-hitters in Major League Baseball history. Halladay was the 2010 NL Cy Young Award winner, finished as the runner-up for the honors the following year, and was an NL All-Star in each of those two seasons.

But as beloved as Halladay is in Philadelphia, he is at least as popular north of the border in the city of Toronto. There, Halladay pitched for parts of a dozen seasons in the uniform of the Toronto Blue Jays. He went 148-76 in Toronto and was a six-time American League All-Star. He captured the 2003 AL Cy Young Award while with Toronto, and finished among the top five in voting four more times.

Now, Halladay and his family will enjoy another tie to the Blue Jays organization, at least temporarily. Braden Halladay, the 18-year-old eldest son of Roy and his wife, Brandy, was selected today by Toronto with their 32nd round pick as the 957th overall player chosen in the MLB Amateur Draft.

Toronto Blue Jays

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On Day 3 of the 2019 #MLBDraft, we’ve selected RHP Braden Halladay in the 32nd round.

Congratulations, @BradenHalladay! pic.twitter.com/64abT3vkeb

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Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame to honor Phillies bench coach Rob Thomson

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Thomson (L) joined the Phillies as Gabe Kapler's bench coach for 2018

A member of the Philadelphia Phillies organization was named today as one of four men who will be honored with induction to the Hall of Fame this coming summer.

That would be the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, and the honoree will be Phillies bench coach Rob Thomson.

Joining Thomson will be the current Milwaukee Brewers vice-president of baseball projects Gordon Ash, who was the former general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. Ash had grown through the Toronto organization beginning with a job in their ticket department when the club was an expansion team back in 1978.

The other two honorees this year will be former players Jason Bay and Ryan Dempster.

Bay was the 2004 NL Rookie of the Year with the Pittsburgh Pirates. During an 11-year career with five clubs from 2003-13 he became a 3x all-star. He won a Silver Slugger with the Boston Red Sox in 2009.

Dempster had a 16-year big-league career with five clubs, including nine seasons with the Chicago Cubs. He won 132 games and was a 2x all-star, finishing sixth in the 2008 NL Cy Young Award voting.

Scott Crawford, the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame’s director of operations, described the four honorees:

“Each of this year’s inductees is a proud Canadian that has had a tremendous impact on baseball in this country. Jason Bay and Ryan Dempster were major league all-stars and are two of the most successful Canadian players of all-time, while Rob Thomson and Gord Ash have seven World Series rings between them and are highly respected in the professional baseball community.”

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Congratulations to Rob Thomson as he is one of four new inductees into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. Induction day is June 15 @Yankees @Phillies http://baseballhalloffame.ca/blog/2019/02/05/bay-dempster-thomson-and-ash-to-be-inducted-into-canadian-baseball-hall-of-fame/ …

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Old Man Winter's Act Getting Old

Now is the winter of our discontent. The last four years have been a roller coaster. But this winter has been extreme by any standards.

Over the winters of 2009-10 and 2010-11, the Philadelphia area received huge snow storms that buried us for days each year. We thought that was bad.

Then we received a couple of much needed and well deserved breaks over the last two winters. Both 2011-12 and 2012-13 were mild, with very little snow. In fact, last winter was extremely mild. It was almost enough to make you forget those snow storms of recent years, and forget what a normal winter is around these parts.

Then came this season. It started calm enough back in December. But over the last month we have received 33 inches of snow, capped by the storm earlier this week which dumped more than a foot on most of the area. Since our average winter delivers about 20 inches, we are already well above that average.

It hasn't been just the snow storms this year. The cold has been bitter and unrelenting. Here in the northeast we have been introduced to a new meteorological term: the polar vortex.

2013 American of the Year: Ted Cruz

The junior U.S. Senator from the great state of Texas, Ted Cruz, has been selected as this website's 10th annual American of the Year, marking the first time that someone born outside of the country has been so honored.

Cruz was born in Canada, in the city of Calgary and province of Alberta in December of 1970 to a Cuban father and American mother from Delaware who were there to work the oil business.

Cruz' parents moved to Houston, Texas in 1974, and he went to a Baptist high school, becoming Valedictorian of his 1988 graduating class. He then went to Princeton University, where he became a debate champion and noted speaker, graduating in 1992. He then attended Harvard Law School where he graduated magna cum laude, while also dealing with his parents divorce during this time.

In 1995, Cruz served in Virginia as law clerk to a true, great conservative jurist, J. Michael Luttig of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and in 1996 became the first Hispanic to clerk for the Chief Justice of the US when he worked for William Rehnquist.

After working a few years in private practice, Cruz joined the presidential campaign of George W. Bush in 1999 as a domestic policy advisor, and was influential in the court process during the contested Florida election results battle at both the state and Supreme Court levels. This led to a role in the victorious Bush administration for a few years before a return to Texas.

During the Bush campaign, Cruz met his wife, Heidi Nelson, a New York investment banker who would go on to work for Condoleezza Rice at the White House and who now works for Goldman Sachs. They now have two daughters together.

What's So Funny, God?

There is a famous old Yiddish proverb that has had many takes on it over the years, widely attributed to Israel Furman in 1968, which is itself a take on the Bible's Psalm 33:10 verse reading "The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples."

That saying of Furman's? "Man plans, and God laughs."

The actual translation of the Yiddish would be that man proposes, and God disposes. In other words, we can make all the plans that we want here on Earth in regards to our lives, but in the end it will be God's plan that will come to pass, whether or not that coincides with our own plans, hopes, and dreams.

The saying came to me this morning as I contemplated a recent dual tragedy which has struck a family that I know personally. They suffered a sudden, recent, untimely death, and now immediately on top of that tragedy have suffered yet another major blow. Without going into details, still fresh and painful for many, there are a number of people suffering because of these twin tragedies right now, and a few whose lives have been completely devastated.

How do we possibly make sense of such apparently senseless tragedy? How can any of that be a part of God's plan for those individuals, for that family? And what does it have to do with that old Yiddish saying that I mention in the beginning of this piece?

No matter what age, we all make plans. Young people plan on where they're going to meet after school, what they're going to do this weekend. Students plan on what courses they are going to sign up for in the next semester or school year. Folks make plans for with whom they want to begin or continue a relationship, how many children to have, their career choice, where they are going on vacation, what's for dinner tonight, and much more.

But how many plans have you made in your life, small or large, only to have something intervene to delay, change, or completely thwart those sometimes well-conceived plans?

Union Busting

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Could the world one day see a true "North American Union"?

Up in Canada this summer, President Bush met with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon in what should have been a standard, wholly positive “meeting of the minds” between the leaders of the three leading nations in our hemisphere.

But many are rightfully concerned that this meeting and other developments of recent years are setting the stage for a government-like North American Union.

At its fullest completed vision, the North American Union (NAU), which has also gone by a few other names as well, would essentially replace the United States, Mexico and Canada as a governing level above the three once-independent nations.

Styled nearly identically to the current European Union, there would be one currency, open borders, and many subtler features that would overwhelm the U.S. Constitution.

Back in 1973, U.S. banking leader David Rockefeller met with American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski and along with other business and political leaders formed the Trilateral Commission.

Conspiracy theories aside, the commission was formed in order to foster closer working relationships among the leaders of the three leading economic spheres of influence: North America, Europe, and Pacific Asia.

A year later, one of the commission members, Richard Gardner of Columbia University, wrote an influential article for Foreign Affairs magazine titled “The Hard Road to World Order” in which he called for “an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece”.

It is from this line of thinking that covert attacks on the United States of America as an independent, sovereign nation began to take place.

In 1979, while running for President, Ronald Reagan called for a “North American Agreement” to produce “a North American continent where the goods and people of the three countries will cross boundaries more freely.” Upon taking office in January of 1981, Reagan called for a North American common market.

In October of 1984, the Congress passed the Trade and Tariff Act, a part of which extended the powers of the president to concede trade benefits and enter into bilateral free trade agreements.

In October of 1987, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was finalized, and signed into law by President Reagan and the Canadian Prime Minster in January 1988.

This led U.S. trade representative Clayton Yeutter to utter the statement “We’ve signed a stunning new trade pact with Canada, the Canadians don’t understand what they’ve signed. In twenty years they will be sucked into the U.S. economy.” Well, those twenty years have now passed, and Yeutter is proving to be a visionary.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush began negotiations with the Mexican president to foster the same type of relationship as had been forged with Canada. A year later, Canadian PM Brian Mulroney asked that the negotiations become trilateral among the three nations.

Over the next couple of years the framework was laid for what has become known simply as NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which formally went into effect in January 1994.

NAFTA basically eliminated tariffs on products traded between the three nations while protecting intellectual property rights and removing many investment restrictions. Over the ensuing half dozen years, negotiations take place aimed at enlarging the scope of NAFTA to include the Caribbean region nations and Chile.

Mexico elected Vicente Fox as President in 2000, and Fox quickly proposed what became known as his “20/20” vision: the U.S. and Mexico would have a common market within 20-30 years.